Hi there,
In today’s post I will tell you about the disaster that was to change phone company at the end of 2024 because DIGI, a new company in Portugal started with a lot of incompetence.
When we arrived in Portugal, we contracted two lines for our cell phones since we needed Portuguese phone numbers to do all our business.
In Spain we had the cell phone line with Simyo which cost us between 1 and 4 euros per month. The internet at home was with Netllar which was the cheapest in Spain and we paid around 20 euros per month.
In Portugal the companies force you to have 2 years of permanence and there is none that offers you the services without forcing you to contract a pack with TV, landline, etc.
Think how absurd this is when nobody uses landlines anymore and when most people do not watch TV channels.
In the end, in Portugal we contracted the two phone lines with NOWO and paid 11 euros per month for each line with 1 giga of internet per month.
At the beginning of December, a company called DIGI arrived in the country and started offering phone lines with calls, messages and 50 gigas per month of internet, for the price of 4 euros. Big difference.
On December 4 we made the portability request and asked to keep our phone numbers. Therefore, DIGI had to manage with NOWO the transfer of these numbers.
We also proceeded to cancel with our bank the charges from NOWO.
On December 21 we received an email from NOWO saying that we had to pay 18.63 euros for the month of December.
As Diego, with his limited Portuguese, was the one who was managing this, he understood that we were being penalized for the change of portability and that this amount was so that they could transfer our numbers to DIGI.
We paid that amount and waited for DIGI to confirm the change of portability.
After a month and a half, we received another email from NOWO to pay 27 euros and here we started to make claims wrongly because we thought that DIGI had asked for the phone numbers since the beginning of December and NOWO had not given them to continue charging us penalties.
At this point Diego contacted DIGI to see what was going on and sent the conversation history we had had with NOWO customer service.
At that time, they responded that they had not received the portability from NOWO, so we continued to mistakenly think that the whole situation was NOWO’s fault.
As we thought it was NOWO that did not want to give up our numbers, we asked for 2 new portabilities and resigned ourselves to having to change our phone numbers everywhere.
At the beginning of February, when we already had our new numbers, we saw on the DIGI portal that NOWO had already transferred our phone numbers.
Then we received another email from NOWO in response to one of our many complaints and saw that they were announcing a merger with DIGI. Imagine how massive the customer drain must have been that NOWO had no choice but to merge.
After re-reading the emails to make this post, we understood that it was not NOWO’s fault but DIGI’s since they had taken 2 months to ask NOWO for the portability.
To top it off, when we were managing the second porting, my line was not working. I could neither call nor receive messages.
We called customer service, and they had no idea what was going on. They escalated it to technical support and told us they would get back to us when it was resolved.
At that time, I was without a Portugal line because NOWO had already cancelled the service due to non-payment and because the line with the new number was not working.
A week later the line started to work and several days later they finally called to verify that the problem had been solved.
I went to see out of curiosity at Portal Queixa and in less than 2 months DIGI already had hundreds of complaints for its malfunction.
We were left owing money to NOWO because of DIGI’s incompetence and we were left with the feeling that we had switched to a crappy company.
We made a final claim to DIGI asking for a refund of the 4 euros we had paid in the two new porting and that they assume the payment of the debt that had been generated in NOWO.
What was clear is that DIGI started their business in Portugal in a very bad way.
On 2/14/2025 we received the answer to the complaint made through Livro de Reclamações. They apologized, which is rare to see in Portugal, and promised to return the values of the portabilities and to compensate us for the damages caused. Regarding the amounts owed to NOWO, they said that we had to manage it ourselves with that company.
Considering how things are in Portugal, the answer given by DIGI is very good.
